Video: Ice Cream Sandwich Face Unlock Defeated With Photo

In the movies, you’d have to construct a pore-perfect rubber mask to defeat a facial-recognition system — or even chop off somebody’s actual face. In real life, all that is needed to defeat the Ice Cream Sandwich Face Unlock on the Galaxy Nexus is a photograph.

Back in October, Google’s Tim Bray denied that it was possible to unlock a Galaxy Nexus using a photograph of the owner. Here, on YouTube, we appear to have evidence that it is not only possible, but incredibly easy.

The hack was carried out on video by ccsoya of the SoyaCincau blog. He set the Galaxy Nexus demo unit to unlock when it saw his face. Then, on another phone, he snapped a self portrait. Holding the phones face-to-face, he unlocks the Galaxy Nexus. Repeatedly.

Some have cried foul, claiming that ccsoya set the Galaxy Nexus unlock using a photo, not his face. He denies this claim, but this experiment is so easy to reproduce that anyone can go test it themselves.

The balance between security and convenience will always be a trade off, but this seems to be rather extreme, with 100% convenience and 0% security. I’d stick to pass codes for now.